Thursday, October 29, 2015

Chicanonautica: Weird Mexican Art: The Dead and Kid Stuff

Still
too warm, but El Niño and the remnants of Hurricane Patricia are
kicking enough moisture over Arizona to cause some impressive
thunderstorms that have soaked the desert that gets streamy as the
sun blazes. Not exactly what Americano cultural expects for fall, but
we're hurtling toward the end of October. The big weekend is coming: Halloween/Días de los Muertos/Dead Daze as I called it in my
controversial novel Smoking Mirror Blues
(to be republished as Tezcatlipoca Blues
in the near future).

Luckily, thanks to
my wife, who works at the bookstore of the Heard Museum, I got ahold
of a couple of fantastic art books that are just the thing for
getting the visual cortex in that Dead Daze mood.

And they're both
bilingual, too.

First,
there's Posada & Manilla: Illustrations Of Mexican Fairy Tales/Artistas Del Cuento MexicanaBy
Mercurio López Casillas that takes us into the world of cheap “penny
press” books – well, actually pamphlets – that children enjoyed
before comic books. Manuel Manilla illustrated them before José
Guadalupe Posada. Manilla wasn't as much of a stylist or master of
the woodcut as Posada, but he definitely laid the groundwork for this
style that is both modern and primitve, and suggests an alternative,
fantastic Mexican universe where European fairy tales blend with
Mexican folklore and history.

It
comes with a spectacular two-sided dust jacket and a facsimile of one of these
books, El Rey y Sus Tres Hijos.

Frightening,
disturbing -- but that was children's entertainment before Walt Disney.

Mercurio
López Casillas is back with help from Gregory Dechant and other
scholars of Mexican art in Images of Death in Mexican Prints/La Muerte: Espejo Que No Te Engaña.
This is an oversized, lavishly illustrated look at the
calavera/calaca Mexican living skeleton and other morbid symbols from
preColumbian times, through the Spanish invasion, to popular
broadsheets where they were often accompanied by satirical poems (presented in their original format), to modern illustration. It's
an unholy feast for the eye, better than an all-night horror movie
marathon. The ancient, popular, and avant garde meld, as is the Mexican
way.

Both these books
are great inspiration for artists young and old, and sources of
important cultural history.